Facebook Says It’ll Take a While to Bring End to End Encryption to Its Apps

End-to-end encryption expected in 2022 at the earliest

Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct are yet to receive end to end encryption, and while everybody expected such a security update to arrive earlier in the two apps, it turns out we’ll have to wait a little bit longer until it happens.

And this is because the social network explains it won’t happen sooner than 2022, though the company says this would only take place “at the earliest.” So in other words, Facebook could very well push the ETA of end to end encryption in Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct even further.

“We’re also working hard to bring default end-to-end encryption to all of our messaging services. This will protect people’s private messages and mean only the sender and recipient, not even us, can access their messages,” the company explains in an announcement today.

“While we expect to make more progress on default end-to-end encryption for Messenger and Instagram Direct this year, it’s a long-term project and we won’t be fully end-to-end encrypted until sometime in 2022 at the earliest. Moreover, the safety features we’ve already introduced are designed to work with end-to-end encryption, and we plan to continue building strong safety features into our services.”

“Consumers want more privacy”

Facebook goes on to explain that people totally want privacy and safety controls, and this is the reason it’s focusing so hard on such updates.

Bu on the other hand, it’s a little surprising to see Facebook needing so much time to bring such an important update to its services, especially given the large userbase that’s been asking for end to end encryption for years already.

“We should consider ways to give people more privacy settings and features within our messaging apps. This also requires thoughtful product design and user education to make the features easy to find and easy to use,” Facebook says.